Macs, Linux to wait as ATO tenders e-tax

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) last week put the contract to maintain and develop its e-tax system out to market, with indications remaining that Mac OS X and Linux versions of the software are a ways off.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) last week put the contract to maintain and develop its e-tax system out to market, with indications remaining that Mac OS X and Linux versions of the software are a ways off.

The selected contractor would need to work on the server
infrastructure and client application components of the 2009 e-tax
system to result in the 2010 version, which has to be operational
by 1 July 2010. The changes will involve including the 2010 system
legislative changes which are required by the Tax Office.

Local IT services firm DWS Advanced Business Solutions has held the e-tax contract until now. The company will work together in a transition period with whichever firm wins the e-tax contract up for grabs. DWS
CFO Lachlan Armstrong said that the company definitely intended to
rebid for the contract.

The software for the e-tax system has been written in a mix of
Delphi, VB, C++, C# and VB.NET, with the user application being
mainly in Delphi, which the ATO would like to maintain.

The w-tax user application is currently able to be run on computers
running Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4, XP Service Pack 2
(32 bit) and Vista Service Pack 1 (32 bit).

The tender documents expressed that
tweaking the e-tax system so it could be used on alternate operating
systems was still on the agenda, however when ZDNet.com.au
contacted the tax office, a spokesperson said that getting the
system working for non-Windows operating systems was not a
mandatory requirement, only "identified as a consideration".

The spokesperson also said that the ATO had not determined which
operating systems it hoped to target.

The ATO said in March 2007 that it intended
on making the system workable for non-Windows operating systems such as Mac and Linux, promising
a trial in 2008 and a new product rollout in 2009. However, the program
encountered "significant challenges and complexities",
according to the ATO spokesperson, which has meant the trial has been indefinitely delayed.